Lev Parnas didn't testify in Trump Ukraine scandal. Will he appear in Biden impeachment?

BOCA RATON — Lev Parnas is telling his side of the story whether a congressional panel wants to listen or not.

The man who was a central figure in the 2019 Ukraine scandal that led to the first impeachment of then-President Donald Trump is now revealing insights into and details of the diplomatic impropriety that is, today, at the heart of the current inquiry into President Joe Biden. But it's a message that House Republicans intent on exposing the so-called "Biden crime family" may not be eager to broadcast to the U.S. electorate.

"The whole motive and the whole Biden stuff was never about getting justice, and getting to the bottom of Biden criminality or doing an investigation in Ukraine," Parnas said. "It was all about announcing an investigation and using that in the media to be able to destroy the Biden campaign and have Trump win."

That much itself is not a novel revelation. The argument was adjudicated in Trump's impeachment probe and trial in the U.S. Senate in early 2020, which ended with the president's acquittal.

But Parnas, a 51-year-old Boca Raton resident, is laying out what he calls a complete story with added pieces of information at a critical juncture as the attempt to impeach Biden rolls into the high-stakes 2024 election year. It all amounts to, Parnas admits, a costly "escapade" which ultimately helped land embattled Ukraine in the crosshairs of U.S. politics.

Whether the House Oversight Committee and its Republican chair, U.S. Rep. James Comer of Kentucky, will mind what Parnas has to say seems a highly unlikely proposition. But Parnas is taking his case to the American public.

In December, he will release a book, "Shadow Diplomacy," and a podcast, "Lev Remembers," will follow. He also is cooperating on a documentary. The common denominator among all the productions is a singular narrative, he said, aimed at "getting the truth out" about what happened with Trump and Ukraine.

"It's all because of one individual that wanted to stay in power, that didn't want to relinquish power," he said.

Genesis of Ukraine scandal was a phone call, but not the one you have heard about

Among the twists disclosed in a pre-publication, limited version of "Shadow Diplomacy" was a phone call that kicked off five years of alleged Ukraine political "witch hunts."

In the fall of 2018, Parnas and an associate, Igor Fruman, were busy networking global and Trump administration connections to get their energy trading and exploration company on sure financial footing. Parnas writes that he was working one of his key administration contacts, Trump confidante Rudy Giuliani.

The pair frequented a Manhattan locale, The Grand Havana Room, where Parnas wrote that one evening that November the two "were talking about ways to get my business off the ground." That's when Giuliani, Parnas writes, excused himself to answer a phone call from a former associate with a tip about the former vice president and his son, Hunter.

The associate told Giuliani in that call, according to Parnas, that the Bidens "had been involved in something perhaps a bit shadier than mere conflict of interest in Ukraine." And, Parnas relates, there were receipts — purportedly "a couple of letters, whistleblower complaints."

Parnas said he capitalized on the phone call. When Giuliani inquired what Parnas, a native of the Ukrainian city of Odessa, knew about his home country, Parnas described offering the former New York City mayor a summary drawn from personal experience, what his contacts in Ukraine were telling him, and what was in the news and social media.

He told Giuliani that the government led by Petro Poroshenko had been friendly to Trump's predecessor, Barack Obama. Then Parnas writes that he showed Giuliani a viral video clip of Biden bragging to the Council of Foreign Relations how he had pressured Ukraine's government to fire a prosecutor named Viktor Shokin.

That was the turning point, Parnas now says, of his relationship with Giuliani and the Trump government.

"When Rudy turned around to me and said, 'Can you get Victor Shokin over?' " Parnas recalled. "And we looked at each other and we said we could probably do that. His eyes lit up and that was it."

Lev Parnas: From donor to a Nixonian White House plumber-like role

In the interview, Parnas said the Grand Havana Room meeting "was the beginning" of his transition from a Trump political donor and hanger-on seeking to jump-start a global business to a Nixon-era-like plumber tasked with digging up dirt on a prospective political opponent.

His particular mission was to locate Shokin and "bring" the ousted prosecutor to Giuliani. The expectation was Shokin would be able to tell the whole story of Biden's meddling in Ukraine, and torpedo the former vice president's widely expected presidential run in 2020.

The reality, Parnas writes in "Shadow Diplomacy," is that Shokin was no star witness. He was "notorious" for inaction on corruption investigations and spent precious time sniping with his predecessor, Parnas writes.

None of that mattered much to him at the time, Parnas concedes. He explains that he was a "deep state"- believing diehard who had drunk the "Kool-Aid" about purported, shady intragovernmental conspirators blocking Trump's White House from key public policy goals.

"We didn't know what actually happened," he said. "We assumed, and Guiliani, me, Trump, all of us assumed 100% that once Viktor Shokin testified, we got Biden red-handed. It's open and shut."

In the end, Parnas concedes, Shokin's allegations were "cockamamie stuff" and the whistleblower information tipped to Giuliani was "bull****."

"There is no Joe Biden fraud," Parnas said. "But the (alleged) Joe Biden fraud, basically, was the key that got everyone together."

What resulted, he describes, was a "perfect storm" of individual but interconnected agendas that has caused enormous suffering in Ukraine, and political distortion in America.

Parnas said that tempest was a combination of his own want to win favor for his oil and gas venture, Trump's obsession with uncovering corruption on Biden, Giuliani's desire to stay in the "spotlight" and the willingness by some Ukraine officials to indulge the U.S. president for their own political benefit.

Partly because of all that, support for Ukraine and the fight led by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the face of a savage invasion by Russia, now a nearly two-year conflict, has become another partisan fault line in America with a high cost in lives and suffering in the former Soviet republic.

"It's because of the politics we have here," Parnas said. "If you support Ukraine, you're anti-Trump because Zelenskyy didn't make the announcement. They didn't give us what we needed to beat Biden."

Parnas seeks to counter image of South Florida ne'er-do-well

To Parnas' frustration, the image of him etched into the American public psyche has been that of a South Florida ne'er-do-well of sorts.

That was the depiction presented in much of the reporting about Parnas after he became a news headliner in the fall of 2019. That followed the disclosure and widespread reporting of a whistleblower complaint about another more famous phone call, this one the previous July in which Trump reportedly pressured Zelenskyy to open up an investigation of Biden.

The coverage included profiles of Parnas in The Palm Beach Post.

"The 47-year-old Ukrainian-born Parnas has left a trail of bad blood and crushing debt as a financial adviser, serial entrepreneur and securities broker, including operating a penny stock outfit, shut down by regulators, employing tough characters … who ended up going to prison for fraud along with a man once purported to be a Russian gangster," read a story in The Post in January 2020.

Much of his 326-page book is dedicated, Parnas said, to countering those portrayals. "Shadow Diplomacy" offers context to his childhood and business background, as well as the ventures and enterprises that he was involved with, in an effort to dispel the unflattering portrait that he says was painted of him.

"The media had a field day. The first six months, we were plastered all over the TV every day like hardcore criminals," Parnas said.

The book, in a way, reads like a manual about using seemingly disparate relationships to network one's way into the Oval Office.

As Parnas writes in "Shadow Diplomacy": "My ambition of knowing a world-famous tycoon had been upgraded into the reality of befriending that same man, who was soon going to be sworn in as the President."

What the Post reported: Lev Parnas in Palm Beach County: Unpaid bills, failed business deals

Parnas expected Trumpian knighthood. He ended up in prison.

The search for damaging fodder on Biden occluded what Parnas said was his objective all along, the launch of Global Energy Partners, the company he and Fruman started.

His business goals amounted to a more-than-four-year effort propelled by, Parnas said, a series of pivots that landed him, a political unlettered, in the inner circle of the most powerful political office on the planet. How so? A knack for schmoozing complemented by expressions of loyalty, Parnas says and writes.

Finding Shokin, and his political holy grail, Parnas expected, would allow him and Fruman "to write our own ticket" — meaning procuring blank check support for the energy venture.

Instead, he landed a 20-month prison term for campaign finance violations, wire fraud conspiracy, making false statements and falsifying records. He served four months in a federal prison in New York before completing the rest of his sentence in home confinement, which ended in September. These days he is on probation.

Now, he says, he has dual missions. One is personal.

"My main goal right now to is get my family together in a nice healthy way," he said, noting how the stresses of working for Trump, facing criminal charges and then imprisonment put incalculable pressure on his home life.

The other purpose, he said, is to "get truth out about what transpired" with Giuliani and Ukraine — and to warn the country about what another Trump presidency would portend.

"The biggest thing I want our public, and the world, to know is this is not about politics. This is not about what policy you agree upon. It's not about liking Joe Biden," Parnas said. "Trump says it himself: 'I'll be a dictator on day one.' Just listen to his words. He's not lying to you."

Parnas sounds like the many other ex-Trump supporters-turned-critics following their own epiphanies. Yes, the U.S. political system has its deficiencies and imperfections, he said, but it's "the best in the world" and there is an imperative to "save our democracy, not allowing authoritarianism or dictatorship" to supplant it.

He hopes some in the Trump base will heed the warning from yet another former brethren, although he acknowledges it's a painful realization to accept they likely will not.

"They don't want to realize who Trump really is, because if they realize it, they will feel that they lost," he said. "The only way we can get through that is to get past Donald Trump and the divisiveness and the craziness he brings with him."

Antonio Fins is a politics and business editor at The Palm Beach Post, part of the USA TODAY Florida Network. You can reach him at afins@pbpost.com. Help support our journalism. Subscribe today.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: Lev Parnas says no Joe Biden fraud in Ukraine. Will House GOP listen?